if you’re on this website, i bet you’re into shit like sustainable online
communities and shared governance. at least probably you think twitter sucks.
you’ve probably also read @tinysubversions’ guide on how and why to run your
own social. you might even be one of those sick fucks who
runs a mastodon instance (i am totally not one of those sick fucks). i say ‘sick fucks’
partly because mastodon is a pain to deploy but also because that place is a
freakshow and the lesson of ‘run your own social’ isn’t necessarily a million
atomized instances that all hate each other. imo a primary takeaway is that a
community has to grow at the rate of trust, meaning that (a) the people with the
most power in terms of determining the norms and membership of the community
need to be very responsive to everyone else, and (b) that there is a limit to
how large it can get. the ‘your’ in ‘your own social’ doesn’t just mean whoever
has shell access to the server.
with all that in mind, it’s obviously not just twitter that sucks. to take an example near and dear(?) to my heart, twitch is a rancid nightmare that i watch a lot of. i also stream myself, but for the last few years it hasn’t been on twitch. instead it’s on a little site called https://trash.cloud that i cobbled together with @prophet-goddess, @actuallyalys, @bobbi-oldmark, and some other pals. anyone can sign up and chat, but there are only a handful of people who can stream on it, and most importantly, only one person can stream at a time. it’s a community space first and a streaming platform second.
so in this case i think you should also Run Your Own (in the literal sense!). the code is all public and (more or less) documented. essentially it’s a bit of rust that adds a simple UI and a chat to an existing streaming server backend.
(and, as of yesterday, it can generate MJPEGs that can be embedded in chosts 😈)
it’s still janky as hell and there isn’t yet any sort of ‘subscribe’ functionality, so for people who live off their income from twitch, it’s obviously not a replacement. but for anyone who is just trying to have a good time online, it’s at least a suggestion of how to do things differently.